Humorism is a system of medicine detailing the makeup and workings of the human body, positing that an excess or deficiency of any of four distinct bodily fluids in a person – known as humours – directly influences their temperament and health.

Ingredients:– 23 and a third shallots, chopped coarsely into rectangular prisms (NOT CUBES)
– one 13-18lb shaved, kneaded, and descaled ecthelion, not frozen or brined
– one 2-liter bottle of diet pepsi OR pepsi max
– one 14oz jar of cucumber regrette, of Bob & George’s brand or similar quality
– one 3oz vial of undiluted prime essence
– a well-stocked spice rack

Since my coming-of-age travels in the far east, I have experienced a great many pleasures. None can compare, however, to the feast of roast ecthelion I partook in one fateful evening in Jakarta, during a gala hosted by a local crime lord who was very pleased with my father for reasons neither will discuss with me to this day.

In 1981, Universal Studios entered the planning phases on what was then called the Universal Broadcast Network. Like every other attempt at a “fourth network” before FOX emerged as a serious competitor and ubiquitous cable changed television, it was a very ambitious near-miss. One of its flagship shows would have been the intense hourlong drama Jaws: The Series, based on the blockbuster film. The following were the episodes pitched to the studio for the initial season, all conceived over a lively three-day weekend by future industry giants Donald P. Bellisario and Steven E. de Souza.

“Pilot” aka “The Grapes of Wrath”

Bodies of large sea life seemingly torn apart are found off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard during an annual wine festival by the crew of a small fishing boat. Fearing a panic at an important time, the corrupt Sheriff Dallas Hawk has his deputy Lefty “silence” the fishermen…permanently. Former police chief, now private investigator Martin Brody of nearby Amity Island happens to be in town for the festival, a tradition he shared with his late wife Ellen, and catches wind of something “fishy.” Recruiting his old friend, Rich Cartwright, marine biologist and trained magician [is there a reason we’re still not using Hooper? – Steve] as well as his streetwise partner “Big” Mac Hunter, Brody follows a trail of bloody streets and dirty money all the way to Sheriff Hawk, who had the fishermen taken out to keep the public from learning that their beloved beach is being stalked by a ravenous shark. He fails to find key evidence linking Hawk to the crime definitively before it is destroyed in an amusement park fire, succeeding only in drawing the attention of the devious sheriff…and also that of alluring lifeguard Tiffany San Sebastian. Brody pledges to stay in Martha’s Vineyard until he gets to the bottom of this case, even in the face of a deadly shark…or a Hawk.

“The Wine-Dark Sea”

During a sandcastle-building contest at the wine festival, a surfboard washes ashore…with no surfer. The massive bite in the side of the board panics the crowd amid growing rumors of the shark plaguing the beach. The sinister Deputy Lefty attempts to calm the citizens, but Tiffany brashly confronts him with evidence she has seen that the threat is real, and a stampede away from the shore wreaks havoc on the pie-eating contest. Cartwright takes Brody and Mac out on his boat at night to hunt for the shark, but are waylaid by a boat piloted by Colombian cocaine smugglers. Mac attempts to bond with his estranged son.

“Blood Red”

The wine festival’s perennial hit Singles Luau is abruptly canceled without explanation. The real reason: Sheriff Hawk’s loyal goons have found the remains of the shark’s first human victim further down the beach. Beautiful but eccentric medical examiner Becky Summer is unable to identify the body despite its distinctive tattoos, which she finds suspicious even before she is pressured into not recording the incident as a shark attack. She calls on Brody to do some legwork, and he remembers having seen the victim’s tattoos on one of the Colombians. An associate of the drug runners is in custody, but is taken by FBI Special Agent Rocco Prince before Brody can talk to him. Cartwright tries to juggle a date with Dr. Summer and his budding ventriloquist career, with unexpected results.

“White Heat”

Cartwright is contacted by Agent Rocco when the captured drug dealer starts talking about a “devil shark.” Brody shares with the agent his suspicions about Sheriff Hawk, whom Rocco identifies from a photo as the Chicago gangster kingpin Ricky Delgado, long thought dead, hiding in plain sight. Unable to locate Hawk, who has been tipped off to his discovery by the eavesdropping Lefty, Rocco and Brody confront the Colombians on the sea. In a freak accident, a dozen kilos of cocaine are spilled into the water when the marauding shark nearly capsizes both boats. Driven into a bloodthirsty frenzy by enough cocaine to kill twenty humans, the shark savagely devours most of the drug dealers…but not Sheriff Hawk, who was hiding on their boat, and narrowly escapes by helicopter, swearing revenge on Brody and the others. Mac and Tiffany mentor a blind teenager who finds an astonishing talent for surfing.

SLN readers are a pretty savvy bunch, so I’m sure all of you are veritable dark web experts at this point. Well, recently I’ve been digging real deep into the archives of the pre-Bitcoin version of infamous drug clearinghouse Silk Road, before it got all commercialized and popular. It used to be a really thoughtful place where people wouldn’t just sell drugs, they’d discuss and catalog their experiences with them. The trip report archive was wiped long before the rest of it when they rebranded and focused on Bitcoin transactions, sadly, but I was able to snag a couple of incomplete mirrors by trading some giraffe vore .mkvs to my resourceful Russian friend Sergei. Presented here are three choice finds from my trawling.

Okay, so let me preface this with, I am normally a pretty vanilla dude. Some weed, some coke on fridays with the boys at the office, a couple of wine coolers and some heroin with sunday brunch, you know, pretty standard stuff, right? I am not adventurous, is what I am saying. I like to keep things routine and moderate. So, believe me when I say that I was a little apprehensive at first, getting handed a Tic-Tac container full of weird forest green pills at a house party. This guy says, “you’ve gotta try this, bro, it’s the latest thing!” I mean, if it’s the latest thing, why not, right? So I’m like okay I’ll give these a shot. BIG MISTAKE. Blacked out fuckin immediately, and I swear to god I came to literally a fuckin’ month later. A MONTH. And this was apparently a really productive month for me, because I am not in my apartment, or even my home fucking city. I am on a yacht off the coast of Spain with a woman our (consensual, he said) sex slave tells me is my wife. He speaks fluent English, but she…. does not. Nothin’ but Castilian Spanish, and she’s acting surprised that I can’t understand her! I guess I must’ve learned to speak it during that blacked-out month, because I still find myself dropping into vulgar Castilian Spanish whenever a soccer game doesn’t go my way. Can’t for the life of me speak it at any other time, though.

Username: WelcomeToNeuYawkDrug & Dosage: A variety of unidentified “research chemicals” from university science lab, between 30 and 50 mL each

Listen. My first year of grad school was rough. My mother had just died thousands of miles away, my girlfriend decided that she was, in fact, not bisexual after all and ran off to marry her high school sweetheart back in Tennessee, and my cat never really forgave me for stepping on his tail the preceding winter. I’m not making excuses, here, really, I’m just trying to provide some perspective. Some context for why I started grabbing expired shit from the 1970s with faded labels off the shelves in the old science building and just fuckin injecting them into my eyeballs like I didn’t care if I lived or died. Because I didn’t. My cat sure as shit didn’t, and once you’ve lost that you’ve REALLY lost everything.

Anyway. So some of this shit was sort of equivalent to getting drunk, some of it was a little more interesting, some of it was responsible for eighteen paintings in one night that are currently fetching exorbitant prices at a gallery in Brooklyn. It was wild and wacky stuff. Grad school means teaching, and teaching means long nights grading papers, and that gets really boring if you aren’t squirting research chemicals into your tear ducts. My student evaluations came back mediocre and unremarkable, so who gives a fuck, in the end? NOT I. And not my fucking goddamn ungrateful piece of shit cat either. I still have him, for some reason, by the way. He’s healthy as a horse, turns 17 this year, and still hasn’t forgiven me for that time I stepped on his tail.

Username: AtreidesNutsDrug & Dosage: Oregano/allspice mixture with “secret ingredient,” used as dry rub on a half-pound of grilled flatiron steak

[The text is a piece of ASCII art that forms the sentence “THERE WILL BE NO REGRETS WHEN THE WORMS COME” in unnecessarily large letters.]

Guten tag, nerd nation! Rejoice, because Value Comics’ controversial crossover event The Hitler Ultimatum is finally coming out in trades! We here at the SLN Comics Silo have the exclusive skinny on the new uncensored and expanded releases of the event that The Mary Sue refused to cover, and Diamond continues to refuse to solicit! Let’s take a look at what’s in each volume…

March to The Hitler UltimatumGathering together the exciting leadup to the event, Volume 0 opens with Wonder Warriors Confidential #45-49, in which the golden age Old Glory deals with the isolation and mounting guilt of having 1940s-era racial sensibilities in today’s America after the CyberCataclysm merged the Classic universe, the recently restored New World universe, and the mainstream VCU, creating the ungodly tide of continuity problems we’ve been sorting with the past few years but ultimately making things way simpler. Rejected by his former teammates in favor of the younger, hipper Faded Glory, the New World version of Sgt. Sam Johnson, he simmers with resentment and begins an unfortunately web-based hunt for the American Dream that leads him to some of the larger white nationalist forums.

This leads into Wonder Warriors seXtreme GunForce Annual #19, in which Young Lust and Gunbattler are separated from their teammates Bloodnado and Assaultforce and stranded in the Wonder Warriors’ War Marina by the rising floodwaters from Hurricane Katrina II. They initially write off Old Glory as a twisted old bigot, but his cutting “alternative” analysis of The Force Awakens and other “politically correct” cinema opens their eyes to a new world of insidious fascism. Finally, in Glory #99, Old Glory brutally murders Glory, his popular, normal, not-a-fascist modern equivalent in a series of brutally gritty, unflinchingly visceral two-page spreads, a sequence that famously took up nearly two thirds of the original issue’s page count before some of the images were removed by editorial and replaced with ads for Paxil. In the trade-exclusive expanded version, the full set of thirty-seven gory two-page spreads has room to breathe, something that beloved comic book hero Glory no longer does, because he has been murdered by a fascist.

The mid-Eighties were a tumultuous time for the already-struggling Value Comics. Their parent company had just sold off numerous assets to stay afloat, their printers were having great difficulty acquiring green ink, and their two biggest competitors were beginning to advance in storytelling and art in ways Value simply didn’t intend to keep up with.

As tends to happen, it was decided that a line-wide shake-up was the best way to revitalize interest in a stable of characters who had been around in some form or another since the mid-50s. Cataclysm in Space had far-reaching effects on the VCU, even if it did ultimately fail to improve Value’s standing in the industry. In addition to some long-needed changes to the status quo of the line’s major characters, the event did much to streamline their oft-convoluted, frequently contradictory histories.